to the tillage of the soil, but their
labors were of the lighter kinds; they sowed the seed and husked the
corn, but they did not reap or garner, while they would doubtless have
rebelled in mass had they been required to undertake the more laborious
tasks incident to irrigation or actual tillage. Even the slave women,
though these of course were doomed to harder service than the wives and
daughters of freemen, were not generally condemned to wearing toil.
Indeed, the institution of slavery, except in the cases of prisoners
taken in war,--a small class of slaves, since such prisoners were
usually sacrificed to the gods,--was milder among the Aztecs than among
any people of whom there is historical record; the slave could marry at
will, could hold property, and could even possess slaves of his own,
while, as has been already said, the child of a slave was independent of
the status of his parent.

It is unfortunately true that there can be found but few names of women
of importance in the history of the Aztecs or indeed of the Conquest
itself; nearly all that is to be learned is general and not particular
in its import. Though the blood of many of the women of that period,
intermingled with that of the Spanish cavaliers, flows in the veins of a
very large number of the Mexicans of to-day, there is yet no trustworthy
record of particular names or fames. It is indeed recorded that
Alvarado, one of the right-hand men of Cortes, married the daughter of
Xicotencatl, a Mexican chief; but she was a Tlascalan, not an Aztec. So,
as space would fail in the compass of a large volume to tell of all the
civilizations which surrounded that of the Aztecs, and also as Dona
Luisa, as she was called by the Spaniards after her baptism into the
Christian faith, did nothing more meritorious than to bear to
Tonitiuh--"the Sun"--as Alvarado was called by the Mexicans, because of
his bright face and golden hair, a number of children who became by
intermarriage the sires and mothers of some of the noblest families of
Castile, she does not deserve particular chronicle here. It may,
however, be well to take advantage of the introduction of this incident
to make the statement that marriage between the followers of Cortes and
his successors and the native maidens--who must first, as an unalterable
rule, embrace the tenets of Christianity, which had borne its earliest
message to them in the flame and steel of the massacre of their parents
and kinsmen-